Among the strongest images of World War II is that of waves of Allied bombers "striking at the heart" of Germany, reducing German cities to rubble and destroying the German will to fight. But of late the issue of the effectiveness of strategic bombing has become a contested one in Britain, and journalist Hastings' contribution to the debate is a crippling blow to the carefully constructed myth of bomber warfare. Deftly interweaving stories of individual bomber groups with the machinations of strategy-making and the development of aircraft technology, Hastings gives a complete—and striking—picture of the Bomber Command at every level. He argues that the myth of bomber effectiveness was set before the outbreak of war; and despite the disastrous early bombing raids, with their high losses and missed targets, the myth died hard. He emphasizes the technological and strategic primitiveness that prevailed at that stage—the most pitiful example being the inability of the Wellington bombers to defend themselves against attack from the side, since their machine-gun turrets could rotate only 80 degrees. At first, the British had such confidence in their "precision bombing" that they made elaborate efforts to avoid civilian targets; but in 1942, with the ineffectiveness of their raids beginning to show, they switched to a policy of area bombing. The justification rested on three pillars: retribution for the German bombing of British cities, the crippling of the German production capacity, and the destruction of German morale. As Hastings notes, the moral implications of the choice were never discussed; and to the above list he adds a critical fourth element—by going over whole-hog to this policy, the British could prolong the opening of the "Second Front" and keep their losses to the 50,000 airmen killed. Hastings argues that strategic bombing did not significantly shorten the war, since it was ineffective until the tide had already turned. But the center of the book is the airmen themselves, who were offered up for slaughter—the chances of any of them lasting a month were slim—and who were transformed during the war from high-living adventurers to highly-trained technocrats. He manages, tersely, to convey something of the horror they experienced over Germany. A successful book in every way; thoughtfully analytic and emotionally gripping at the same time.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1979
ISBN: 0330392042
Page Count: 412
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1979
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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